Keshona Far Freedom Part 1

apprehensive, even alarmed, but he wasn't.

  "Tell me about it," not-Milly said with commiserating inflection. "Life is a dream, without control, without understanding, without meaning."

  "You sound sad. Are you a real person? Are you alive? The other Milly said she wasn't."

  "You can still ask these stupid questions, zombie-boy?"

  He was not accustomed to such emotion from Milly. His computer had always spoken factually and patiently, no matter how hard he tried to elicit a human reaction from it.

  "Are you alive?" Samson asked.

  "I'm not dead!"

  "What is a zombie?"

  "Somebody who's dead but is still walking around."

  It was strange how the haze in his mind seemed to lift a little when talking to this person. But... "You're not very nice!"

  "It isn't as much fun as naughty."

  "Do you know anything about my parents?"

  "I know they're dead."

  "You don't know that!"

  His other Milly never expressed an opinion about his parents, except to say it was logical he had parents. He had worked hard to get Milly to explain his possible origins. He only learned by looking at his reflection to ask about race and culture, birth and death. His mythological parents grew to godlike stature in his imagination. Their logical existence kept hope alive.

  "If they were good parents and loved you," not-Milly said, "wouldn't they do anything in their power to rescue you? They've had plenty of time for the rescue, so they must be dead."

  "I could have been kidnapped and escaped and nobody knows where I am!" It was one of many excuses he gave his parents for abandoning him. Sometimes he hated them. More often, he created elaborate and emotional scenes of reunion, and never questioned why he was abandoned.

  "Sure," the female voice replied with sarcasm.

  "Why can't you help me, whoever or whatever you are?"

  "Why couldn't the other Milly help you, whoever or whatever she was?"

  "I don't know! I always thought she was just my computer. It's only today that I began to think she wasn't my computer at all. She started talking to me like she was a person or maybe an AMI. And it didn't sound like her voice was always coming from the computer. Why do you sound like her? How do you make your voice come out of the air in front of me? Where are you?"

  "I'm somewhere over the rainbow. Maybe I sound the way I do because that's how you want to hear me."

  "Why can't you help me? If you can make your voice come out of the air, you can probably do other things. You can see me, can't you? You're just invisible like the Navy officers."

  "I'm not visible because I'm not there, Sammy. Nor do you need to know what else I can and cannot do."

  "You could talk to the Navy people and tell them where I am."

  "I think they can find you if they want to."

  Not-Milly's pitiless voice echoed behind him, as though she was abandoning him, too, as Samson continued down the tunnel. He tried to wait for the Navy officers every few steps but the urging of the stone didn't allow him. Dusty light beams stabbed into the tunnel through gaps in the debris. The tunnel sloped downward into darkness. He used his spear to feel his way along, the blade sparking against the mineral surfaces. The darkness stretched on for a timeless distance.

  Samson's spear lost contact with the tunnel wall just ahead of him. Impelled to walk at a fast pace in the dark, he frantically probed the changing tunnel but still fell down when the floor sloped steeply. He lay in dampness for a few moments until the stone made him move. He didn't know if he was injured and bleeding. He was numb beneath the tingling, pleasuring signals of his tiny master.

  He got up and walked as slowly as he was permitted. His footsteps echoed in the black distances of a large room. He was afraid of a dark with no stars and moon and shiny space cities. He kept the spear in front of him, striking support pillars, and then a wall. He followed the wall until he found a doorway. Beyond the doorway he could not touch the opposite walls with his spear extended fully. He walked for a long time in the dark, the wide corridor sloping upward as it followed the spiral design of the African Space Elevator pedestal building.

  He thought the Navy would try to find him but he was afraid they wouldn't. He was also very tired. The admiral was right: she hadn't fixed all that was wrong with him.

  = = =

  They stood atop a table of concrete, captain and admiral, and looked around them for a sign of Samson. Each could see the other as an image projected through their shiplink augment but no one else should have been able to detect their presence. They also studied passive sensor data overlaid on their ocular terminals as the yacht and Baby searched for Samson.

  "Why is the Elevator still here, still projecting into space?" Horss asked. He gazed up at the giant pedestal, shaped like a smoothly threaded screw twisted into the earth. "It must be five hundred years old. And dangerous as hell."

  "Five hundred twenty-three," Demba quoted from her data augment.

  "But its collapse isn't imminent?"

  "No. The other three elevators were designed for easier disassembly. This was the original. It should be another five hundred years before they need to take it down."

  "Where did he go?" Horss wondered aloud, sounding genuinely concerned.

  Admiral Demba had to consider her own feelings about the boy. Did she have any feelings for anybody, even for herself? She had carried Samson out of the yacht, unconscious in her arms, and she had worried about him less as a real person than as an enigma and a huge complication. Now that he was gone from sight, he seemed less real, as though he was so impossible that he must never have existed, that she must have imagined him. But she had dressed him in clothes she had learned how to fabricate. She had measured him and studied him. She had felt good about what she had accomplished. She had done all that - she had! - all the while wondering and wondering and wondering. She remembered the feel of him, his helplessness, limp in her arms. He had to be real!

  "We're here," Horss said, "but there's no trace of Samson. I see no way in, not down here. The ramps entered the elevator building well above ground level, and they no longer exist. There are no doors or stairs or ladders Samson could have reached. I think we missed him. He may have fallen in this rubble and hurt himself. I think we should backtrack."

  "We may never find him," she said. She anticipated a feeling of huge disappointment, of losing something almost like magic. "It's as if he never existed."

  They turned away from the wall of the elevator tower. They leaped down and picked their way through a tangle of rusting cable exposed when demolition pulverized long beams of pre-stressed concrete. The ramps and roadways had been intentionally destroyed, as if in preparation for tearing down the entire elevator. These connecting structures must have provided additional strength to the elevator's base, in addition to transporting billions of Earth's population into the elevator, to send them to new homes in Lagrangian space.

  "There are many places in this field of rubble," Horss commented, "where he could stay hidden, if he's immobile. We may have to ping to find him. What is that?" Horss pointed to a field of level debris off to one side of their route. The lengthening shadows of late afternoon brought contrast to the chaos of broken material.

  "It appears to be the track of some machine," the admiral said.

  "What machine would cause such an irregular track?"

  "Is that a tunnel it leads to?" Admiral Demba felt an urge within her augment-deadened body that made her stride quickly down the strange path to the hole. When they reached it she knew what the urge was. She very much wanted to find the boy! Her sanity seemed to depend on Samson's existence! They squatted in the mouth of a tunnel that appeared purposely drilled through an irregular ridge of rubble. They examined the smooth walls and noted the oval shape of the cross section.

  "I don't like this tunnel," Horss said, "because I can't imagine how or why it was made."

  "He was here. Samson went this way." The admiral pointed.
"He fell right here. That's blood! He was hurt!"

  "Samson!" Horss shouted into the tunnel. "Why would he go in there, especially if he's hurt? Are we so terrible that he runs away from us? You knew it was wrong to send him away!"

  "I know it now. But I think there is something happening to him that I couldn't anticipate. I didn't believe in Milly, but I didn't believe Samson was mentally unstable. I thought he liked me. I thought he wouldn't go so far."

  "How could you believe he liked you in five minutes of conversation ending in his forced departure?" Horss asked angrily. "Let's get in there, Admiral. Samson may be in danger."

  Even as she worried about his physiological telemetry, Demba thought Horss was passing a test that she was failing. Despite the situation into which she had forced Captain Horss, he was only concerned now for the safety of Samson. She, on the other hand, still hoped that she would live to sail the Freedom. Its mission was her responsibility, it was another mystery to solve, and she deserved to share the fate of its crew.

  The low height of the tunnel made their progress slow and uncomfortable.

  = = =

  His legs operating by some other force of will, Samson shuffled by a phosphorescent sign in the vast upward spiral of the passageway. The sign's green glow marked the location of yet another emergency communications terminal which no longer existed. Fatigue dragged at his legs. Another glow of symbols drifted toward Samson in the gloom: an internal elevator. He slowed and tried to stop. His legs trembled. The red